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Playlist "German OWASP Day 2025"

A CISO's Adventures in AI Wonderland

Holger Mack

As a CISO (or any other security expert) in the area of AI, you can find yourself in increasingly challenging and sometimes bizarre AI-related situations not unlike Alice's adventures in Wonderland.
Depending on whom you speak to, people either have high (inflated?) expectations about the (magic?) benefits of AI for security efforts, or try to explain why "AI security Armageddon" is looming... and that is just the security part of the story. All other areas in your organization are heavily using or experimenting with AI (e.g., vibe coding, automation, decision making, etc.), challenging (or ignoring) established security practices.
This talk tells the story of the daily experience of dealing with AI as a CISO in a cloud-application startup. Which experiments failed or were successful, which advice is helpful, what is difficult to apply in practice, which questions are still open...
The motivation for this talk is to start a conversation among security experts on how we can shape a secure AI future and not get pushed into the role of being seen as "hindering" AI progress.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/